Media resource locator

A media resource locator (MRL) is a string of characters used to identify a multimedia resource or part of a multimedia resource. A MRL may be used to identify inputs or outputs to VLC media player.

The MRL syntax is:

[[access][/demux]://]URL[#[title][:chapter][-[title][:chapter]]] [:option=value ...]

(in earlier versions of VLC, the delimiter before the optional title and chapter was '@', not '#'.)

MRL section	Description	Possible values
access	How to obtain the media data	cdda: CD Digital Audio dir: Filesystem-based directory dv: Digital Video/FireWire dvd: DVD file: Filesystem-based file ftp: FTP gnomevfs: GnomeVFS http: HTTP mms: Microsoft Media Server pvr: PVR rtp: RTP rtsp: RTSP simpledvd: simple interface to DVD-Video, bypassing menus (?) smb: Server Message Block tcp: TCP udp: UDP vcdx: Video CD vlc: commands to VLC itself, e.g. vlc://pauseseconds and vlc://quit
demux	The format of the source data	a52sys/Raw A/52 demuxer aiff/AIFF demuxer asf/ASF v1.0 demuxer au/AU demuxer avi/AVI demuxer demuxdump/File dumpper dtssys/Raw DTS demuxer flac/FLAC demuxer h264/H264 video demuxer m3u/Playlist metademux m4a/MPEG-4 audio demuxer m4v/MPEG-4 video demuxer mjpeg/M-JPEG camera demuxer mp4/MP4 stream demuxer mpga/MPEG audio / MP3 demuxer mpgv/MPEG-I/II video demuxer nsc/Windows Media NSC metademux nsv/NullSoft demuxer nuv/Nuv demuxer ogg/OGG demuxer playlist/B4S playlist import playlist/DVB playlist import playlist/M3U playlist import playlist/New winamp 5.2 shoutcast import playlist/PLS playlist import playlist/Playlist playlist/Podcast parser playlist/XSPF playlist import ps/MPEG-PS demuxer ps/MPEG-PS demuxer pva/PVA demuxer rawdv/DV (Digital Video) demuxer real/Real demuxer sgimb/Kasenna MediaBase parser subtitle/Text subtitles parser tta/TTA demuxer ty/TY Stream audio/video demux vobsub/Vobsub subtitles parser voc/VOC demuxer wav/WAV demuxer xa/XA demuxer
URL	The URI of the source	See http://www.w3.org/TR/uri-clarification/
title	Which title to select for input	Positive integer
chapter	Which chapter to select for input	Positive integer
option	Options to apply only to the specified MRL	See VLC command-line help for a full list

Exception

An exception to these rules appears to be with UDP/RTP streams, where it may look like:

udp://@:portnumber
# Example: 
#   udp://@:1234
#
# Apparently the @ has a meaning like localhost, though
#   udp://localhost:1234
# doesn't seem to work in this circumstance, for some reason.